Configure Network Caller ID (NCID) to work with an OBi202
If you have an OBi202 (or other ObiHai/Polycom device), you do not need a modem to get Network Caller ID to work with your phone system, at least for reporting purposes, though for automatic hangup, you will still need to attach a modem. In most circumstances, this is not of much use, but if you want to measure the effectiveness of a service like NoMoRoBo, you will need to do this. Because NoMoRoBo hangs up before NCID registers the call via the modem, you will need to capture the call via the Polycom (previously ObiHai) device if you want to identify calls that NoMoRoBo kills before NCID recognizes the call and hangs up.
The obi2ncid gateway provided with NCID can read and parse the syslog from the Polycom device and report the calls that are killed before NCID can recognize the call.
The discussion that follows assumes that you have already installed NCID.
Set up obi2ncid.conf
To set this up, configure the /etc/ncid/obi2ncid.conf file. In most cases you can keep the defaults but in almost all cases you will want to update the identifiers for each line on the ObiHai device to match the extension or number that you are using:
# Defaults: SP1, SP2, SP3, SP4
linesp1 = "Home"
linesp2 = "Work"
linesp3 = "Fax1"
linesp4 = "Fax2"
Configure ObiHai Device for Syslog
Next, you will need to log in to the Polycom device to and change the destination IP address and port for the syslog to match the IP address of your NCID server and the port that the obi2ncid program listens:
Start the obi2ncid Service
Finally, you will need to start the obi2ncid service:
sudo service obi2ncid start
Interpreting the Results
Once you have this set up, you will get additional call information in the NCID client displays if your provider has been blocking calls before NCID registers them:
- For calls that NoMoRoBo hangs up, you will get one entry from the ObiTalk device.
- For calls that NoMoRoBo does not block, you will get one entry from ObiTalk and one from the NCID modem (ncidd).
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Writing an Article Using the Joomla Frontend
Joomla has both a “frontend” of general user interface for writing aritcles and a “backend,” or administrator interface. The administrator interface has potentially more options and can be more confusing for new users. The tutorial that follows describes how to write a basic article for your organization’web site using the frontend interface. The website for Hillcrest Toastmasters is used for the example.
Resources Menu Before Logging In
In most web site designs, the options for adding a new article will not be available unless you log in. The example web site is designed so that the options appear under “Resources for Toastmasters” menu; before login, this only shows a menu option for the list of useful articles as shown in Figure 1.
Log In to the Website
To log in on most web sites, there will be a login screen or button. On the example web site, use the login panel at the bottom of the right side of the screen. The “Secret Key” box is used for Two Factor Authentication; this provides security when accessing the web site from a public terminal. If you do not know more, leave the Secret Key blank. For more information see Setting Up Google Authenticator for Joomla.
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Using CiviCRM on Joomla
Most technical professionals end up doing website technical support for one or more community organizations. Most organizations need operational systems for managing members, handling dues payments and event registration fees and calender management, but these organizations frequently do not have the money to pay for a commercial services to support these needs. Many non-profits have adopted CiviCRM to handle these organizational capabilities. Although CiviCRM runs on Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal, most CiviCRM installations are on Drupal which is beyond the technical capability of many small organizations.
Although Wordpress is a popular CMS for small organizations, it does not have the robust permissions system that both Drupal and Joomla have and is not well-suited to CiviCRM installations; in Wordpress, controlling access to sensitive information would be difficult, unreliable, or impossible. Because of the migration issues between Drupal 7 and Drupal 8, Joomla may actually be a good alternative for Drupal 7 installations that do not want to make or cannot make the conversion to Drupal 8.
The article that follows describes the basic features of CiviCRM, how you can use the Joomla permissions system to control sensitive information, and how you can use Joomla menu options to present CiviCRM capabilities to end users.
CiviCRM is a Non-profit Oriented Customer Relationship Management System
CiviCRM provides both backend administrative tools that are accessible through the Joomla backend to users with administrative privileges, and frontend information and registration tools that are accessible through the Joomla frontend either publicly or to users with front-end privileges. For many non-profit community organizations these two capabilities are critical. There are several vendors that host CiviCRM installations, so if your organization loses the technical person who manages the CiviCRM installation, there is a fall-back alternative that is competitively priced compared to commercial membership management solutions.
Administering a CiviCRM installation is not a trivial undertaking; there are many decisions to be made for member types, document types, case types and numerous other things, so an organization must have a good technical succession plan in place before making the decision to implement a CiviCRM system. This is true of any membership management system.
Perhaps the biggest consideration in hosting a CiviCRM system for membership management will depend upon the risk of private data compromises and whether or not the organization can protect itself technically and legally from the risk of compromise.
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Upgrading from Ubuntu 14.04 to 16.04
After putting it off as long as possible, I finally bit the bullet and upgraded from Ubuntu 14.04 to 16.04; there were just too many things where I needed the newer software levels in 16.04. Fortunately, this upgrade went quite smoothly unlike my experience moving from 12.04 to 14.04. The article that follows is a discussion of the upgrade steps specific to 14.04 to 16.04, but this is also probably useful for any upgrade.
One useful step that I did not do but highly recommend is deleted old Linux kernel images, as this would have cut hours off of the upgrade process.
Backup
There are a variety of ways to back up a system. I use the following to maintain multiple copies of files:
- Clonezilla for disk-level backups.
- Duplicity for both local and off-site backups.
- Subversion for code. While this is not truly a backup, it provides an easy way to copy the current version of my files.
- Box, OwnCloud and other cloud services.
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Gallery Plugins for Joomla
Many business and organization web sites need to display galleries of photos or figures with the capability to provide or restrict user’s ability to download images. There are many free and fee extensions available for Joomla but two are particularly convenient if you work with Adobe Lightroom or load your images via scp or ftp. The sections that follow discuss two alternatives that use inline syntax within an article to specify a gallery. These are not good choices if you need to take payment for images, but can work for many web sites.
The examples here are taken from a family history web site where images of court probate records are displayed so that site users need not visit a courthouse and potentially damage fragile court records.
Note that many image gallery extensions use a lot of Javascript and CSS; minification, compression, consolidation and caching extensions can cause problems with some options. Make sure to turn off your performance software while you are debugging gallery problems.
Neither of these tools will add images to a site map that you can register with Google; you will need to generate a static site map or use another extension. Similarly, neither of these extensions will put an index.html file in the image directories to prevent an attacker from doing a directory scan of your media folders.
Simple Image Gallery by JoomlaWorks
Simple Image Gallery provides an easy way to make a gallery from an entire directory of images using simple syntax: {gallery}image_directory{/gallery}. It does not have any way to control downloads, and only allows fixed thumbnail sizes or other gallery characteristics–unless you upgrade to Simple Image Gallery Pro.
The free version of this product does not get frequent updates and was broken for a while in the fall of 2017, but was updated to run on Joomla 3.8.
Sigplus by Levente Hunyadi
Sigplus uses identical syntax to Simple Image Gallery, and appears to be a fork of the GPL code in Simple Image Gallery. It uses identical {gallery}image_directory{/gallery} syntax for including a gallery in an article. Sigplus offers much more customization than Simple Image Gallery–especially the ability to fit thumbnails into a bounding box while preserving the aspect ratio. It also allows you to specify a gallery subdirectory for thumbnails and previews, so you can pre-render the images using some other tool. This option also amounts to a permanent cache, so that lightly-used sites have better response times for large galleries.
Sigplus has a search plugin that allows you to search the website for image metadata; for the family history website used in this example, this makes images searchable by surname, location or other tags put into the metadata before exporting from Lightroom. For a community organization web site, this would allow someone to find all photos of themselves if the photos were tagged before export from Lightroom.
Sigplus has a module that gives you a way to incorporate a gallery as part of site design rather than just within an article.
Sigplus is a good alternative if you need more functionality than Simple Image Gallery but do not have the budget for the Simple Image Gallery Pro.
Image Indexing and Site Maps
Both of these extensions use Javascript to manage the image display, so when a robot crawls the page, the image generally will not be indexed by crawling the page. For many uses of a gallery extension, this is the behavior that you want.
If this is not what you want, you will need to create a site map and submit it to the search engines along with your other site maps. Since these plugins do not work with most (if any) Joomla site map extensions, you will need to use another utility to generate site maps of these images if you want Google to index them. If you have shell access to your server, this XML PHP script looks like a good free alternative, though it does not recursively search directories beyond the first level unless you make some changes to the script. If you have PERL installed on your web server, the Google Site Map Generator may work too.
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